If it seems that every other week there's another film festival to choose from, that's probably because there is. Australia has a remarkable amount of film festivals, encompassing regional and cultural programming for the most part, but also thematic and audience-specific content. Thus we have - amongst others - the Korean Film Festival, the Lebanese Film Festival, the Persian Film Festival, the Jewish Film Festival, the German, French, Italian, Spanish and Greek film festivals, and also film festivals primarily aimed at or incorporating films by seniors, bicycle enthusiasts, women, queer-identifying individuals, buddhists, green enthusiasts and people with disability.

CJ Johnson has looked at the diversity and multiplicity of Australia's film festivals before on Movieland, but there are always more to cover. This week he interviews the directors of two very different festivals about to begin: Mouna Zaylah and Fadia Abboud from the nationally touring Arab Film Festival, in its eleventh year, and Stefan Popescu from The Sydney Underground Film Festival, in its seventh. They discuss the diversity of Arab cinema and the unexpected prevalence of female directors, the challenges of programming extreme cinema in the face of AustralianClassification, the body which monitors all screen content in Australia, and whether or not there's room for cannibalism on screen.